The Damnation of Theron Ware eBook

Another burning problem, which he had not been called
upon before to confront, he found now entangled with
the mysterious line which divided a circus from a
menagerie. Those itinerant tent-shows had never
come his way heretofore, and he knew nothing of that
fine balancing proportion between ladies in tights
on horseback and cages full of deeply educational
animals, which, even as the impartial rain, was designed
to embrace alike the just and the unjust. There
had arisen inside the Methodist society of Octavius
some painful episodes, connected with members who
took their children “just to see the animals,”
and were convicted of having also watched the Rose-Queen
of the Arena, in her unequalled flying leap through
eight hoops, with an ardent and unashamed eye.
One of these cases still remained on the censorial
docket of the church; and Theron understood that he
was expected to name a committee of five to examine
and try it. This he neglected to do.

He was no longer at all certain that the congregation
as a whole liked his sermons. The truth was,
no doubt, that he had learned enough to cease regarding
the congregation as a whole. He could still rely
upon carrying along with him in his discourses from
the pulpit a large majority of interested and approving
faces. But here, unhappily, was a case where
the majority did not rule. The minority, relatively
small in numbers, was prodigious in virile force.

More than twenty years had now elapsed since that
minor schism in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the
result of which was the independent body known as
Free Methodists, had relieved the parent flock of its
principal disturbing element. The rupture came
fittingly at that time when all the “isms”
of the argumentative fifties were hurled violently
together into the melting-pot of civil war. The
great Methodist Church, South, had broken bodily off
on the question of State Rights. The smaller and
domestic fraction of Free Methodism separated itself
upon an issue which may be most readily described
as one of civilization. The seceders resented
growth in material prosperity; they repudiated the
introduction of written sermons and organ-music; they
deplored the increasing laxity in meddlesome piety,
the introduction of polite manners in the pulpit and
classroom, and the development of even a rudimentary
desire among the younger people of the church to be
like others outside in dress and speech and deportment.
They did battle as long as they could, inside the
fold, to restore it to the severely straight and narrow
path of primitive Methodism. When the adverse
odds became too strong for them, they quitted the
church and set up a Bethel for themselves.